Two of my fellow Americans and I are waiting outside our professor´s office to take our History of the Church oral exam. We´re supposed to start at 9:30, and we´re eager to start and finish, since it´s our last exam of the semester. 9:45 – no professor. 10:00 – no professor. 10:15 – you guessed it: no professor.
We´re all trying to ignore the elephant in the hallway with us: call it Constantine, the Council of Nicea, or the Arian heresy… instead, we´d like to distract ourselves and calm our nerves. A seminarian classmate joins us on the bench, and wants to jump on the bandwagon when he discovers we´re taking the exam orally. That gives us a better conversation topic than the elephant.
Camino
At this point, you need to know that when you say el Camino here in our little world (which means “the way”); it means one of two things. For Spaniards at large, it means the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage to the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago de Compostela. For us San Damasonians, it means the Camino Neocatecumenal (the Neocatechumenal Way). I´ve yet to have my Spanish experience of walking the Camino de Santiago, but I´ve learned quite a bit about the other Camino.
The Neocatechumenal Way, as described by their website, is “an itinerary of Catholic Formation” based on the formation process of the first Christians as they prepared for baptism, and as “an instrument in the parishes at the service of the bishop to return to faith many of those who abandoned it.” A large group of the seminarians who study at San Dámaso are from the Redemptoris Mater seminary, training to be missionary diocesan priests as part of the Camino community.
Our classmate who was waiting for the exam with us grew up in Rome, but lived as a seminarian in Ecuador for five years; studying for two, and doing missionary work for three with a family from the Camino community. After sharing with us some of his story, he explained how he and his brother seminarians receive their international destinations by picking a slip of paper out of a bowl…Chinese accepting to go to Africa, Italians to Ecuador, and all the continents in between.
For me, I experience a unique depth of communion with the members of the missionary congregations present at San Dámaso. Although the ways in which we are sent here and there are diverse and the missionary work we do each has a different emphasis, knowing that I´m talking to someone who has also embraced a new country in living a missionary charism fans my own desire to ardently evangelize all nations by saying to my Lord, “wherever you go I will go” (Ruth 1:16). It´s an experience which is part of my daily life in community, but it´s also beautiful to see it lived out in other charisms. It´s definitely part of the miracle of the Church: people who are living where they are living, doing what they are doing, because they´ve given over their plans to the Lord…because they´ve fallen in love with Him and chosen whatever He chooses.
So, in the end, our professor had confused his schedules, and we got an hour of marveling at the creative and personal caminos that the Lord has chosen for each one of his disciples. From one charism to another, the Holy Spirit has not tired of breathing new life into the Church.
“All the paths of the LORD are mercy and truth…” (Psalm 25:10)
